Service organizations, such as consumer-service organizations, financial institutions, and product retailers, service customers using contact centers. Contact centers, also known as customer centers, may handle a variety of tasks, such as new-business acquisition, customer service, technical support, or customer billing. Organizations running contact centers seek to provide a service level of incoming calls that ensures satisfaction of customers. To achieve this, a contact center may have a number of agents answering calls from customers and supervisors monitoring the operation of contact center.
In a contact center, interactions between the contact center supervisors and agents are often disjointed. For example, supervisors at a contact center may not be aware of an ongoing shortage of agents until the service level of the contact center has dropped for a certain period of time. As the supervisors are not promptly notified when workflow issues occur at the contact center, the supervisors are not able to take prompt remedial actions to manage the contact center to bring back the service level, resulting in a compromise in the business goals of the contact center. Further, supervisors at the contact center may be required to log into their workstations at the contact center in order to view updated analytics of the contact center and status of agents. While the supervisors are attending meetings or otherwise away from their desks, it is difficult for the supervisors to monitor the operation of contact center and take appropriate actions when service level drops. A mechanism that effectively brings workflow issues at the contact center to the supervisor's attention and allows efficient interaction between supervisors and agents is therefore desired.